Art and Aspall at the Aldeburgh Festival

Orford Ness is an abandoned former military site, used throughout most of the 20th century for top secret experiments. Now a nature
reserve owned by the National Trust, it remains one of Britain’s most mysterious and bleak locations, in no small part because is
still littered with unexploded devices and debris.

It’s not the most welcoming of environments – a type of stony desert stretching for 12 miles along the Suffolk coast,
exposed to the North Sea and only attached to the mainland by a small strip of land at its northern end.

"An unstable place. Nothing is fixed here, the whole place is moving and changing."

It’s this shifting environment and instability that inspired her work The Secret Landscape. She focuses on the
natural structure of Orford Ness – its stones – and how they have been sea-shattered and bomb-blasted over time.

Anya Gallacio was commissioned by SNAP, along with the 14-18 NOW
Festival to produce The Secret Landscape installation at Orford Ness and Snape Maltings. The SNAP visual arts programme is part of the Aldeburgh Festival
– a world-renowned annual music festival held at Snape Maltings. SNAP encourages artists to try something new and we’ve been
proud to support the programme for a number of years.

Gallaccio has produced a series of giant photographs of one of these fractured pebbles, magnified 20,000 times under an
electron microscope. There’s something extra-terrestrial about the images, which perfectly captures Orford Ness’s eerie,
wild and mysterious atmosphere, as this video shows.

Visit the exhibition

The installation at Snape Maltings is open until 29 June, where you’ll also find Bee Composed by artist Lily Hunter Green (which we’ll be writing
about in another blog post), so we’d really recommend paying a visit if you’re in the area.